


make this place your home

by wordslinging



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Comfort/Angst, Families of Choice, Gen, Hugs, Loss, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:34:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25453213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordslinging/pseuds/wordslinging
Summary: Nile’s still having nightmares pretty regularly. Often they’re of Quynh, or about all the violence she did and had done to her in the process of stopping Merrick. She’ll talk about those pretty easily, and the three older immortals will take it in turns to comfort or reassure or just be there for her. Sometimes she dreams that something terrible happens to Booker and they don’t know, can’t help, because they left him to face the next century alone. And because Joe still can’t hear Booker’s name without muttering about cowardice and betrayal and Andy is still wrestling with the fact that her last death may well come before she ever sees him again, there’s an unspoken agreement that those nightmares are Nicky’s to soothe.The dreams they’re least equipped to help her with are the ones about the family she left behind. All of them centuries if not millennia removed from that kind of loss, they can remember and sympathize, but Nile’s absolutely alone in feeling that pain for the first time.Or: Nile misses her family, Nicky lends a sympathetic ear, and there's some much-needed hugging.
Comments: 13
Kudos: 260





	make this place your home

**Author's Note:**

> Here hold this *throws a bunch of immortal found family feels at you*

Nile’s still having nightmares pretty regularly. Often they’re of Quynh, or about all the violence she did and had done to her in the process of stopping Merrick. She’ll talk about those pretty easily, and the three older immortals will take it in turns to comfort or reassure or just be there for her. Sometimes she dreams that something terrible happens to Booker and they don’t know, can’t help, because they left him to face the next century alone. And because Joe still can’t hear Booker’s name without muttering about cowardice and betrayal and Andy is still wrestling with the fact that her last death may well come before she ever sees him again, there’s an unspoken agreement that those nightmares are Nicky’s to soothe.

The dreams they’re least equipped to help her with are the ones about the family she left behind. All of them centuries if not millennia removed from that kind of loss, they can remember and sympathize, but Nile’s absolutely alone in feeling that pain for the first time.

This morning she’s curled into the big armchair in the safe house’s common room, looking very, very young in the pre-dawn darkness. Nicky has to remind himself sometimes that even if she’s the youngest and newest of them, she’s still a grown woman and a soldier, not a child.

He hands her one mug of the tea he just made, sits down on the sofa with the other, and asks, “Do you want to talk about it?”

Nile takes a minute, holding her tea in both hands and staring into it like it holds answers. “I dreamed Merrick was alive somehow, and he went after my mom and brother.” Nicky makes a sympathetic noise, and she looks up at him. “I know it was just a dream, but I woke up thinking I need to make sure they’re okay, I can ask Copley to check on them and they never have to know I did it. And then I thought—“ she looks down again, brow furrowing, “if I do that, and he tells me my brother made it to class okay today or comes up with a picture of my mom at home…” she trails off, and Nicky nods. Better to avoid the temptation, the reminder that she _could_ contact them if her resolve not to broke.

She sighs, scrubbing a hand against wet eyes. “I guess y’all never had to go through that with your families, huh? No phones, no internet...once you cut yourselves off, you were cut _off_."

He nods again. “When I left to fight in the Crusades, my father and sister were still alive. I hoped, at the time, that I’d see them again. But between the distance to travel to the Holy Land, all the things there that could kill me, all the things back home that could kill _them_...when we parted, we said goodbye as if it were the last time. I’m glad I did that.”

He pauses for a sip of tea, then goes on. “When we found Sebastien, he refused to cut off contact with his sons. Andy warned him how hard it would be, but he would have left us before he left them.”

“Sebastien…” Nile says, and then, because there’s only one person that can be, “Booker.”

Nicky allows himself a small, bitter smile. “Sebastien le Livre. His wife had died in childbirth with their youngest, and no matter how Andy tried to convince him he would just say ‘I won’t make orphans of them’. For a while it was nice—the rest of us got to be like uncles and an aunt to them, a chance we never got with our own blood.”

It was nice, until it wasn’t. He remembers the slump of Booker’s shoulders when he came back from the hospital that last time, how clear it was that something in him had broken for good. Andy had said “I _told_ you,” just once, then pulled him into her arms and rocked him like a child.

“Having someone’s family in our lives, even for just a while, made me wonder what became of mine,” Nicky tells Nile now. “It took a long time to find the records, but eventually I learned my sister had four children who lived to adulthood, and three of them had children of their own. I lost track a few generations later, but I’d like to think I still have nieces and nephews out in the world.”

“Were you ever tempted to try and make contact?” Nile asks. “Get to know them, even if they didn’t know your connection?”

“Many times,” he replies. “Mostly when there’s some sort of global crisis and I’ve wondered if they’re affected, if I could help them. But...Joe is my family now, and Andy, and you, and Booker, even still. Far more than people who share my blood but have never met me. If I reached out to my descendants, and that drew the wrong kind of attention, exposed us to people like Merrick…” He shakes his head. “I’ll never do that. Not if the world was ending.”

Nile looks down and presses her lips together, then nods. She's a soldier. She knows how to do what must be done.

Reaching across the space between them, Nicky takes one of her hands in his. "I know we're not a replacement for the family you're giving up, but remember you have us, now. Andy has her own struggles, and I know Joe and I can get a little wrapped up in each other--" Nile shoots him a look, and he snorts a laugh, "--okay, a lot wrapped up in each other. But we're here if you need us, always."

"Thanks," she replies, squeezing his hand. "I couldn't do this alone."

They sink into a companionable silence, still holding hands, and Nicky is, for a moment, selfishly glad the powers that be--whatever they may be, fate or God or just random chance--brought Nile to them. He's always been an affectionate person, a caretaker even when he was among those charged with waging a holy war, and then the list of people he was allowed to truly know and care for shrunk to three, then two when they lost Quynh, three again with Booker. And it's not as though he ever tires of giving affection to Joe or Andy, but to have someone new in their little family after so long is an unlooked-for blessing, even knowing what it cost her to join them.

"Would you like to tell me about them?" he asks after a while. "Your mother and brother?" He leaves the _you don't have to if you don't want_ unspoken, and Nile's quiet for long enough that he's about to stand up and take their mugs to the kitchen when she speaks again. 

"My brother's younger than me," she tells him. "He just started college, and he's the smartest person I know. He'll get into something and decide he needs to read _everything_ about it--Civil War history one month, different styles of architecture the next. Mom and I used to joke that the library in our neighborhood was gonna start charging him rent, he spent so much time there."

Nicky smiles. "Sounds a little like Booker. The rest of us were all wary when the Internet came along--it made it so much harder to move through the world anonymously--but Booker was _crazy_ for it. I don't think I ever saw him happier than when he learned he could carry whole libraries with him on one electronic device. And your mother, what is she like?"

"A fucking _badass_ ," Nile says, and he grins. "She worked part-time when we were little so she could be home with us as much as possible, especially when my daddy was deployed. After he died, his pension wasn't enough to keep doing that, so she was working full-time with two kids to raise on her own. And I know we do some pretty intense shit on a regular basis? But doing what she did takes a whole different kind of strength."

"It does," Nicky agrees. "She raised you well."

Nile's smile fades as she looks down, rolling her mug between her hands. "Andy told me she can't remember her mother or sisters' faces anymore," she tells him, and her voice wavers, threatening to break, as she says, "I don't want that to happen to me."

Nicky wants to tell her that will never happen, and can't. He still remembers his father and sister's faces well enough, but his mother, taken by fever when he was a boy, is just a soft blur in his mind. Even when Nile can carry her family's faces with her for now, no farther away than the phone in her pocket, there's no guarantee she won't lose that at some point, the way all of them have lost so much to unforgiving time.

Instead of offering false comfort he stands, urges Nile up as well with a hand at her elbow, and pulls her into a hug. She accepts it gladly, wrapping her own arms around his middle and smushing her face into his shoulder, and Nicky kisses the top of her head and then rests his chin on it, holding her tight. 

His t-shirt is a little damp when she pulls back, but she's composed, strong. "I'm going back to bed," she declares. "Gonna try to get a little more sleep before Andy drags me back to the training ground for fifty more ways she can kick my ass."

"If it's only fifty, she's getting soft in her old age," Nicky says, and then, hastily, "Don't tell her I said that."

He moves to gather the empty mugs and Nile heads toward the stairs with a yawn, but turns back to him before she gets there. "Hey, Nicky? Thanks. For everything."

Nicky gives her a fond smile. "That's what family's for."


End file.
